Mobile phones have ruined our ability to think straight

By Zoe Strimpel

March 5, 2018 — 7.11am

London: At 35, I'm probably a bit young to be going senile. Yet that is exactly what it feels like is happening. Very often I go into a room and forget why, or grab my bag to check something in my (paper) diary only to find, 10 minutes later, that I'm deep in a Facebook thread on my phone.

Sometimes I go to boil the kettle for a hot water bottle and clean forget - something else has grabbed my attention. This is terrifying enough.

Mobile phones, a source of constant distraction.

But the interruptions and blanks in my trains of thought while I'm actually in front of a screen are on a whole other level. I can sit down to write something and it can take an hour - yes, an hour - to extricate myself from all the prompts and alerts and red dots that assail me when I open up my laptop with its four email accounts, Facebook, Twitter, news sites and last night's Netflix.

The worst thing? I submit to all this needless noise with craving-like intensity. And once I finally get into whatever it is I'm working on, I find that every few sentences, my mind drifts back to those accounts - what can I check? What can I Google? What can I buy?

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A sense of boredom from social media.

My guess is that I'm not going senile. It's that after nearly 10 years of 24/7 internet (I got my first iPhone nearly a decade ago), my ability to concentrate - our ability to concentrate - has been blown to pieces.

This, it seems, is because our brains have got confused, and have begun to imitate internet browsers. Just as you can always open more tabs in your browser, you can - as digital life has made all too clear - always cut short one thought and open a new one. This is bad for thinking, productivity and, by depriving us of the pleasures of concentration, happiness.

At last, studies are beginning to catch up with all this, using hard data to state the bleeding obvious. An experiment by researchers at the University of British Columbia has captured the emotionally deleterious effects of our addiction to so-called connectedness. The study of 301 adults sent out for a meal concluded that the mere presence of a smartphone, spectrally gleaming away on the tabletop, robbed the phone owner of the enjoyment of spending time with their dinner partner over a meal.

The diners who put their phone in a bucket before the meal had a better time: they felt more connected, more in the moment, and less like they could be doing something, anything, elsewhere.

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the team concluded that phones conferred a constant itch to check and refresh and update and browse and scroll, thus making owners not just distracted, but bored. Bored and restless. I don't know about you, but I feel rubbish when I'm bored and restless; dissatisfied with the world and myself.

Turns out I'm very far from being the only one who feels this way. When science journalist Catherine Price found herself scrolling eBay for Victorian-era doorknobs while her newborn fed and gazed up at her, she decided to research how and why phones took over, fracturing not just our concentration but our ability to be in the moment at all, and how we can retrain ourselves.

Among numerous depressing findings, Ms Price pointed to a UK survey of more than 1700 people showing that 62 per cent of women and 48 per cent of men had checked their phone during sex. The result of her investigation was How to Break Up with Your Phone in 30 Days, which became an instant bestseller when it came out last month. In it, Ms Price explains how to "take back your life" with tips such as taking regular "phasts" - or phone fasts - only checking social media and news on a desktop or laptop, and buying a non-telephonic alarm clock so that your phone isn't the first thing you reach for in the morning.

The destruction of our ability to think through anything for more than the two seconds it takes to make a hashtag has had a dire impact on the political as well as the personal. Just look at the for-Twitter-only posturing of those leading the Brexit debate.

Last week, Remainers rallied around the inscrutable hashtag #fbpe ("follow back pro-eu") and went into trolling overdrive. Or take the row over John Major's ludicrous call for a second referendum, with David Lammy scolding Nadine Dorries for referring to those she "disagrees" with as "traitors". This garnered over 3,000 retweets.

Oh, for a return to the days when we actually had attention spans. When there were ideas rather than hashtags, theories rather than soundbites and the tranquillity of genuine peace and quiet. #nostalgia.